Monday, January 9, 2012

A very long post!

Sorry for being MIA but schools been all sorts of busy since we've gotten back. We've been busy learning all about winter animals and let me tell you my little sweeties have been eating it up. We started our unit by brainstorming animals we could find in the winter, then we read the story Animals in Winter by Henrietta Bancroft and charted any new animals we may have learned about.

To go with our winter animals talk we made this little craftivity. It's a "blanket of snow" covering some of our winter animals. This crafitivity is just a piece of construction paper, some winter animals that we cut out, plastic wrap stapled to the construction paper and white paint. On the back of each paper students wrote what their favorite winter animal was and some even added a picture of the animal too. It's a simple craftivity, but often the simplest tasks are their favorite things :)

We moved on to polar bears next, one of my favorite winter animals. I visited the San Diego Zoo recently and took lots of photos of the polar bears so we began our discussion with those. We read the book Follow The Polar Bears by Sonia W. Black, after reading we charted what we learned about polar bears. (Please ignore the fast messy writing their 4 & 5 and I don't have time for perfection ;) Charting is one of our new favorite things to do at circle ,we like to see how many answers we can fit on one piece of paper and see how many facts we remember from the books.We learned that polar bears have no fingers so we tried painting with socks on to see what it would feel like to have no fingers. After we painted with socks I asked the kids what they thought about the activity, many of them thought it was very hard to paint a real picture. They had a blast with this activity, it will definitely be one I do again :)

We started talking about penguins today! It was perfect timing too because we are on the letter Pp in our handwriting books! I'm cracking up right now at how horrible my penguin is on our penguin fact chart hahah oh well the babes loved it and that's all that matters!

Here's to a great week y'all, I hope to be back soon with some more winter animal stuff and what our centers look like right now :)